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Features » June 2, 2014

Yes, It’s Okay To Have a Metaphorical Rape in a Disney Movie

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In a sense, the rape allegory in Maleficent is only restoring the subtext that the first Disney version of Sleeping Beauty cut out.

I would love to report that Maleficent is a great movie. Unfortunately, it’s a muddled, inconsistent junk-heap of a movie at best: Its bad scenes are abysmally terrible, and even its good scenes (which can be very good) suffer from taking place within a bad movie. Which is a shame, because when Maleficent is working, it’s a powerful—and very feminist—take on the Sleeping Beauty tale.

For those who've missed Disney's blitz of promotion: : Maleficent is Disney’s attempt at doing Wicked-lite. Just as Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel—and its massively popular musical-theater adaptation, which made a star out of Idina Menzel—attempted to re-make The Wizard of Oz as a vindication of the misunderstood Wicked Witch of the West, Maleficent does the same thing with the villain of Sleeping Beauty: the wicked fairy who curses the princess to prick her finger on a spindle and fall into an eternal sleep.

In order to explain why a grown woman with superpowers would spend her time crashing baby showers and knocking teens into comas, Maleficent gives its title character (played by Angelina Jolie) both a political edge and a traumatic backstory. In this version of the tale, Maleficent is the leader of “the Moors,” a peaceable fairy kingdom that’s always warding off invasion from the “greedy” and evil human kingdom just down the road. She also has huge devil horns and draconian wings, which make her look like some fascinating-yet-grand Greek harpy. (The wings, in particular, are central to the plot.) One day, Maleficent befriends a young human boy, Stefan, who would be king. They fall in love. Nevertheless, in order to be appointed the leader of the human kingdom, Stefan is told that he must kill Maleficent, the leader of the fairies.

And here’s where things get dark. As in, very possibly too dark for a PG movie: Stefan does not kill Maleficent. Instead, he takes her out, drugs her drink, and cuts off her wings while she’s unconscious, so that he can bring them back to the humans as a trophy. If the obvious allegory here didn’t occur to you the moment you read the phrase “drugs her drink,” trust me, it will: The scene of a drugged Jolie waking up alone, feeling around her own tattered dress, and proceeding to scream and sob hysterically for about one full minute, drives the point home pretty unmistakably. It’s a deeply upsetting scene, and Jolie gives it her all; her reaction is so raw and real that you hardly even notice the goofy devil horns. At the viewing I attended, children were gasping and sobbing in the movie theater. This original trauma is the wound from which Maleficent’s hatred of the humans (and her drive to curse Stefan’s daughter, the Princess Aurora, with unconsciousness) is derived.

Several reviewers have expressed bafflement and displeasure that Maleficent introduces rape (albeit metaphorical rape) into a beloved children’s story. “Disney thought it would be a good idea to spend well over a hundred million dollars making a movie that shows the backstory of Sleeping Beauty to be a rape/revenge tale,” writes Devin Faraci at Badass Digest. “It was, predictably, not a good idea.” Meanwhile, Christopher Orr at The Atlantic returns to that scene of Jolie shrieking as she regains consciousness: “Maleficent awakes screaming: betrayed, defiled, mutilated, her most wondrous gift torn from her. (Have I mentioned yet that this is not really a kids’ film?)” Even Lindy West at Jezebel, who enjoyed the film, finds the rape allegory to be “cheap and clumsy,” noting that “it's a movie (for children!) in which TWICE women are deliberately rendered unconscious and then physically violated, once ‘for her own good.’”

However, it’s worth noting that Sleeping Beauty has always been a story about rape. In the earliest known version of the tale—the Italian “Sun, Moon and Talia,” by Giambattista Basile—the princess is not awakened by “true love’s kiss,” or by a kiss at all. She’s discovered by a king who repeatedly rapes her while she’s unconscious. She gives birth to two children in her sleep, before one of those children dislodges the splinter in her finger and wakes her up. Later versions of the tale (including the version recorded by the Grimm Brothers, or by Charles Perrault, who’s credited as a writer on Maleficent) censor this ending, to make it more chaste and less violent. But that central image—a man “kissing” an unconscious woman—made it into the Disney version, and has survived into the present day.

Indeed, you could even argue that the central curse of Sleeping Beauty—the prediction that, on her sixteenth birthday, the beautiful princess shall “prick her finger” on a spindle and fall into a “sleep like death”—is a rape allegory, one of those wild and eerie and inappropriate bits of dream imagery that give fairy tales their enduring power. When the princess is a child, she’s safe. But as soon as she reaches sexual maturity, she will be penetrated. There will be blood, and pain, and it will cause her to fall into a living death. If you buy the idea that fairy tales were women’s stories—coded ways of passing down wisdom about the world—the “pricking your finger on a spindle” story is a very effective way to talk about how sexual assault (or sex and marriage more generally, in heavily patriarchal societies where women didn’t get to choose their partners or exert power within relationships) can feel like the end of a woman’s life.

So, in a sense, the rape allegory in Maleficent is only restoring the subtext that the first Disney version of Sleeping Beauty cut out. And the idea of retelling that story to give agency and dignity to the victim—centering it, not on a passive, two-dimensional trophy princess who happily marries the guy who kissed her while she was passed out, but on a scarred, traumatized, angry woman—is extremely compelling. There’s a raw power in the scenes of Maleficent’s trauma and retribution. You get the sense that you’re watching snippets from a much better film, a dark feminist fairy tale about how women’s pain and agency is cast as demonic by their abusers and oppressors.

But Maleficent is not that movie. For one thing, it descends rapidly from “watchable” to “unbearable” whenever Angelina Jolie is not on screen. Jolie’s screen presence is already well on its way to becoming legendary: She has the undeniable, high-voltage visual charisma of an old-school matinee idol like Greta Garbo or Marilyn Monroe, and future generations will probably speak of them in the same breath. When she shows up, clad in fluid black and dripping with menace, her sheer star power is enough to spackle over the movie’s lazy plotting and soggy dialogue. But whenever the camera cuts away from its title character, we’re left stranded in a sparkle-overdosed day-glo fairyland. full of wee, winged sprites who are so aggressively chipper and adorable you find yourself hoping they’ll run into the business end of a bug zapper. (The director, Robert Stromberg, was a production designer on Avatar; think Nabu, with a much higher ratio of giggling and frolicking.)

Then, too, there’s the fact that Maleficent never seems entirely sure of what story it wishes to tell. It’s not giving away too much to say that Maleficent ultimately comes down to a story about the relationship between two women, and their attempts to save each other. (Like last year’s Frozen, it leaves itself open to a refreshingly queer reading; Prince Charming, hilariously, is disposed of within about two scenes, leaving Maleficent and the Princess Aurora to work out their own, much more central relationship.) But the movie never seems quite clear on what we’re supposed to think of Maleficent’s anger. The primal power you see in the scenes of Maleficent cursing King Stefan, the “rape/revenge” angle so many reviewers have noted, quickly gets lost in the story’s drive to soften its title character—to supply her with maternal instincts, and with regret over all that Stefan-cursing magic business, including a scene in which she cries while talking about how she “got lost” in “hatred and revenge.” It’s not enough to say that Maleficent has reasons to be angry, that her “wickedness” is actually self-empowerment when viewed in its proper context: The movie also needs to assure us that she’s a nice lady, even though the character (and Jolie herself) is most compelling when she’s cruel.

There are moments when you see the great movie Maleficent is trying to be. Consider Jolie’s soliloquy over her lost wings—“so big they dragged behind me when I walked, and they were strong … they never faltered, I could trust them”—and how well it works as a speech from a woman mourning her own lost power and confidence.. But those moments are lost within a movie that doesn’t trust its own subtext. I wish I could report that Maleficent is good. But, even though it’s not, it’s worth watching anyway, just to get a sense of what might have been.

Had the lead character been a male whose wings were cut off by a female, would we then be discussing the castration metaphor in a Disney movie? In any case, these are moot points---it was, at its heart, a bad movie. I am SO done with listening to things being rewritten as viewed through some nonsensical feminist lens, and I am sick to death of films that feel they have to drag me and my sensibilities through muck and sludge and foulness in order to make a point---and one I didn't want to be party to anyway. So the lesson here is what? That when the woman is raped, she becomes an evil monster, but once she kills her rapist, she transforms back into the sweet, generous, loving individual she was before? Because that's how healing occurs? ROFL. Seriously??? A poor effort was only made far worse by this asinine garbage psychology. What a sad, pathetic joke of a movie.

Posted by storypeddler on 2015-11-04 15:12:12

Oh wow I hate when people look too into good movies and criticize them over silly things.

I feel like you may not have read the article...and possibly that you haven't seen the movie.

The scene where Stefan drugs Maleficent and steals her wings is exactly as it's described here, and Maleficent's journey from that day is also an excellent (metaphorical) depiction of someone who has had her power and agency taken from her by force -- the way, say, many women have their power and agency taken from them through sexual assault. It would be incredibly difficult to watch those scenes and not have the parallels occur to you.

But even if this is the first you've read or thought of that being a metaphorical rape scene, I fail to see how that interpretation is insulting, and particularly how this article is "slamming a Disney movie in the process." This article writes about what the movie does well with that metaphor, and it ends by recommending the movie on the basis of the strengths of those scenes...if anything, that interpretation is the primary (and possibly only) reason to watch this movie or care about it at all. Seeing the process and fallout from that scene is certainly the reason I think it's a movie worth watching -- it's a story rarely told and even more rarely told well -- and it's clear that the author of this article feels the same way.

Posted by Alicia on 2014-09-23 17:25:37

Le concept et la passion du soleil.

Quand

l'arbre de la

vie rappelle

la jeunesse

un tendre

concept décrit

le soleil.

FrancescoSinibaldi

Posted by Sinibaldi on 2014-06-24 03:48:12

Jolie quipped that is was to illustrate rape, so I guess she need therapy and she if F...... up ??? Jeffrey?? LOL

Posted by Gbb88 on 2014-06-11 19:09:45

I was about to call you a smart aleck, but I see what you did there. :P

Posted by Jerry Dugan on 2014-06-10 11:11:52

While I think Maleficent was a good movie, and worth watching, I do see the point about metaphorical rape. Maybe that's because I work as an educator for a rape crisis center/battered women's shelter, I dunno.

While rape essentially is a violent attack against another person sexually and violates the victim on a very intimate way, Stefan does drug Maleficent and violates the one thing that she held dear as a fairy. He takes her wings violently and through deception.

Many rapes do happen with drug-facilitation by someone known to the victim (~85%-86%), mostly alcohol, with victims waking up realizing they've been violated by someone they trusted. Maybe the writers did not intentionally take this angle, but there are parallels between what this character experiences in the film and what happens in real-world rape cases.

Posted by Jerry Dugan on 2014-06-10 11:11:29

Metaphorical rape? What an insult. The author is reaching for something that just is not there and slamming a Disney movie in the process.

Posted by Melissa on 2014-06-08 13:21:40

Wow. You're pretty clueless, aren't you? It's pretty obvious that your only exposure to fairy tales has been the "happily ever after" PAP that Disney's been feeding the masses for decades. Fairy tales were ALWAYS rather dark, as they were worst-case-scenario morality tales, for the most part.

Why don't you go do some research, and find translations of the ORIGINAL "fairy tales." You go read those, and THEN you can decide if Sady Doyle, and those of us who AGREE with her about the rape allegory, are, as you say, "fucking idiots." Until such a time as you actually KNOW what you're talking about, YOU'RE the fucking idiot.

Posted by SyntheticPhylum on 2014-06-08 11:46:56

How sad that their are seven upvotes, when the "commenter" is so obviously uneducated as well as ignorant, concerning literature and fairy tales. No, the only thing "disgusting" is willful stupidity.By all means, seek therapy, or better yet, try educating yourself.

Posted by sophie on 2014-06-07 19:42:23

I don't think the mutilation of Maleficent is only a rape allegory, it is, sure. But It also has the very literal sense of cutting off a woman's wings.

Posted by Gabriela Fonseca on 2014-06-05 15:58:39

Starting off any comment with an insult and expletive is a clear indication of under-education and arrogance with it. thanks Harriet for the considered and informative response which reiterates several points made in the article. I suspect Jeffrey only had time to read and react to the inflammatory header, more's the pity! I really enjoyed the breakdown and analysis, and will probably go and see it because the depths and metaphors in fairy tales fascinate me! To the extent, I wrote my dissertation on Chinese Fairy Tales and their socio-religious symbolism. Useful because they are usually the spoken world transmitted through generations which embody perspectives and wisdom which is usually unrecorded by the laity.

Posted by CHERRYBRIXX on 2014-06-03 08:01:10

I don't think you can have read many fairy tales (other than the censored Disney versions) if you think that they weren't originally dark and disturbing in many ways.

Obviously the Disney versions, which were designed for children, tend to be sanitized and usually have the darker themes removed. Actual fairy tales, on the other hand, were not written for children but rather came from folklore. They were verbal stories, told and retold over generations, and dealt with some of the most difficult aspects of human life; rape, murder, death, disease.

Take the original Sleeping Beauty, for instance; not only (in one traditional version) is she raped, but the Queen who cursed her is forced to wear red-hot iron shoes. In a frenzy of pain, she dances herself to death as entertainment at the wedding between Snow White and the Prince.

In Cinderella, the stepsisters cut off chunks of their feet to fit them in to the glass slipper, and bleed to death as a result.

In an early version of Beauty and the Beast, the reason the nobleman was turned into a beast in the first place was for raping an orphan child.

In other words, fairy tales have been used to explore the dark and terrible aspects of human nature forever, and this article is only showing an awareness of that. Pretending that these things don't exist won't make them go away. A person doesn't need to have 'the eyes of a rapist' to see that the story of Sleeping Beauty addresses the idea of rape - only the knowledge that rape exists and has been explored in art for thousands of years.

Posted by Harriet Page on 2014-06-03 04:42:15

Jeffrey, come on...did you skip the symbolism class in film school?

Posted by Juanita Vasquez on 2014-06-02 23:21:38

You my dear, are a fucking idiot. People like you that take a fairytale, and turn it into to somthing ugly are what's wrong with the world.

There is somthing terribly wrong with someone who sees rape in a story about a fairy. It says to me me that you either watched the movie through the eyes of a rapist, or went looking to spin somthing out of nothing so you had material to fuel your pathetic career as a washed up writer. Either way it's discusting.